[LRUG] DHH, Rails, and London

[Yevhenii Kurtov]

Hey James,

I've been in Britain for four years and I'm proud to call it home. Yes,
there are many issues, and, for example, my team is working hard on making
primary care more efficient. The company was started by Australian and
Canadian PhDs, and our Knowledge Lead (effectively Applied AI lead) is an
Iranian with a PhD from Middlesex.
I guess all of us contributed to London's lost British identity from that
perspective.

Also, Reform UK's head of policy, Ziauddin Yusuf, called the ILR revocation
and mass deportation plan "Operation Restoring Justice" and they're not
going to apologise for it, in his own words. Does Yusuf contribute to
"demographic nightmare" and to "Brits being pissed" in David's eyes?

There is a lot to unpack here, and a tech-entrepreneur, a driver and a
proud dad raised in an ethnically homogeneous society may not necessarily
have time and/or incentive to pay enough time to account for all the
details of the situation.

In the end of the day, the fact that people from all over the world and all
walks of life can live in relative peace is a miracle that gives me a lot
of hope for humanity's future. Sure, Copenhagen is a nice city, but that
won't happen there. And I'm happy about that when I'm visiting it. I'm
happy for it to stay Danish. Even though it's not my business at all.

What I'm not happy about is people taking away an option for a peaceful
coexistence and us thriving as a humanity and a coherent whole off the
table.

The amount of resolve and genuine leadership that Britain showed during the
last years stems from its very core, and is going against the grain with
the spirit of our time.

Above all, I want it to succeed, and I've been thinking of how I can help.I
believe the best option for me is to offer help in migrating to
Elixir/Phoenix.  If there is a practical interest, I can try to help with
that. Free of charge. I also hope there will be other people in the
community who would be interested in contributing.

Best,
Yevhenii

On Thu, 25 Sept 2025 at 10:47, James Smith via Chat <chat at lists.lrug.org>
wrote:

> Hi folks,
>
> I recently read DHH’s take on London, how it’s “no longer British” and his
> support for Tommy Robinson and the far right, and quite frankly it made me
> sick, having been a Rails dev since 1.2, and a Brit since 1976.
>
> If it did the same for you, you might want to co-sign this open letter
> I’ve started calling for the Rails Core team to cut ties with him and
> remove his influence: https://github.com/Plan-Vert/open-letter.
>
> If this doesn't bother you, or you just don’t want to mix politics and
> code, then fine, please just delete this email and move on. Rest assured
> I’ve had all the standard abuse already, there’s no need to repeat it.
>
> Yes, forking Rails it would be almost impossible. Yes, the attempt will
> probably fail, I knew that on day one. But I had to try something, I love
> this language, framework and place too much to let them be tarnished like
> this.
>
> cheers,
> James Smith
>
> PS I did check with the organisers before posting “political” content to
> the list.
> _______________________________________________
> Chat mailing list
> Chat at lists.lrug.org
> Archives: http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org
> Manage your subscription: http://lists.lrug.org/options.cgi/chat-lrug.org
> List info: http://lists.lrug.org/listinfo.cgi/chat-lrug.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.lrug.org/pipermail/chat-lrug.org/attachments/20250925/701cd693/attachment-0001.htm>